Beginning Drama 11-14

Jonothan Neelands

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134014651
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

This guide explores the roles, skills and knowledge needed to become an effective drama teacher. It combines practical advice on planning, teaching and assessing with the best teaching practices. It also offers lesson plans for years 7-9 students to use intheir teaching.

SECTION 1

The drama curriculum

How do we begin to plan a drama curriculum for the middle years? In this chapter we will consider the issues and elements of such a curriculum. This will include some discussion about what should be included and excluded, leading to a definition of theatre and the framing of aims and objectives. Further sections give advice on the principles of progression and continuity which might underpin the drama curriculum and suggest a framework for assessing pupils’ achievements in drama.

The chapter closes with notes on the important relationship between drama and language development and a reminder of the vital role that drama can play in young people’s lives and in the life of the school.

The field of drama

What should a drama curriculum cover? What are its priorities in the middle years of schooling? What will pupils be expected to know, understand and be able to do?

In our world, the term ‘drama’ is used to refer to a diverse range of cultural practices which range from dramatic literature through to dramatic events in the news. In between we find the drama of TV and film, live theatre and the lived dramas of our personal and social lives. In our ‘dramatised society’ what is to be selected from the field of drama for inclusion and exclusion in a curriculum for drama?

The problem of making a selection from all the possibles in the contemporary field of drama is compounded by the problem of making a selection from the past. Whose histories and traditions do we include? There are obvious problems, in our pluralist and multicultural classrooms, in limiting the history of drama to those writers and practitioners who have contributed to the development of the modern Western theatre. The Western conventional theatre of the last hundred years or so has developed as a literary art, increasingly restricted to particular social groups and increasingly differentiated from other genres of popular drama and entertainment. Its selective tradition is often told in a form that suggests that the conventional theatre of our time is the natural evolution from earlier and inferior sources, particularly from the oral and communal traditions of performance. What messages does this send to pupils from cultures that have living performance traditions that are different? What does it tell pupils whose social and cultural history is different from that of the middle-class theatre audience?

What it is that we are preparing pupils to do in drama? In English, pupils become literate and effective speakers, listeners, readers and writers. In music and dance we prepare them to be players, dancers and critical audiences, but in drama there is an even wider range of roles that we might prepare them for: playwrights, dramaturges, actors, designers, technicians, directors, stage managers. Drama is the most social of all art forms; it uses a range of diverse skills and roles in its production. The range of roles is further extended when film and TV production are included in the drama curriculum.

Beyond these roles, there are also the roles and skills associated with the pupils’ own use of drama, both in the classroom and in school performances and extra-curricular drama clubs. The participatory and cooperative forms of theatre that have become associated with the practice of drama in schools require pupils to be effective negotiators, group members, researchers and devisers in addition to the conventional roles described above.

How can a drama curriculum cover so much?

Traditionally, approaches to curriculum planning in drama have tended to distinguish between ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’ In this distinction, ‘theatre’ is often taken to mean the study of the literature and practices of those conventional forms of professional and amateur theatre which have become associated with middle-class Western audiences (the literary and private aesthetic tradition). When this conception of ‘theatre’ operates, the emphasis is often on the formal study of the achievements of playwrights and on the skills needed to understand and appreciate their work in performance.

‘Drama’ on the other hand is taken to mean the practice of improvised and participatory forms of drama, which often derive their essentially oral and communal aesthetic from popular forms of entertainment. The practice of ‘drama’ is often seen as serving important and immediate personal and social purposes in young people’s lives.

The problem with this historical distinction in drama education is that it drives an unnecessary wedge between two living traditions, or genres, of performance which ought to be studied and practised in harmony. Theatre can be both the literary professional theatre and the popular oral and communal theatre. It is part of the wonder of the art that it has developed so many different forms in response to the living contexts in which it is made and responded to. Theatre is one aspect of the cultural field of drama, but theatre is also a field in which there are many different positions, traditions, genres and histories.

There will always be problems with a drama curriculum that creates an imbalance between these exclusive concepts of ‘theatre’ and ‘drama’ and the aesthetic traditions that they represent. An emphasis on a socially restricted concept of ‘theatre’ may ignore many pupils’ own experiences and everyday knowledge of drama and other forms of popular entertainment and may ignore the important contribution that drama education can make to their own living experiences of the worlds in which they live.

To ignore the literary theatre tradition also results in exclusion. Knowledge and understanding of how such theatre is produced and how it is understood and fully appreciated is not generally available to all social and cultural groups. It has been historically restricted to those of a certain education and upbringing. For many pupils, school is the place where they too can be introduced to and enjoy the pleasures of the literary theatre while becoming conscious of its particular social history.

We need the kind of balance that many English teachers struggle for between reading and appreciating novels and the literary heritage, for instance, and encouraging pupils to use their own familiar linguistic and literary resources to communicate and interpret their own experience. It is a balance between acquiring the specific education required to decode and critically appreciate the literature and performance of theatre in the Western tradition and practising forms of drama which, like the mass-entertainment drama of film and TV, depend on knowledge and experience that is generally available for their enjoyment.

These problems of selection, inclusion and exclusion suggest an approach to curriculum planning in drama that focuses on the core skills and concepts that underpin the diversity of genres, histories and roles within the field of drama. A general foundation course will either prepare pupils for further vocational study in drama or provide them with the skills and knowledge to appreciate the role that drama will continue to play in their lives.

It is not just a question of balance in the curriculum between ‘high’ and ‘low’ dramatic practices, but of connection. Rather than reinforcing the socially constructed differences between ‘high’ and ‘low’ forms of drama, a new conception of the dramatic curriculum should stress the connections: the shared processes of production and reception. There is no reason why dramatic literacy, like verbal literacy, cannot be taught through the vernacular and informal ‘texts’ and text-making processes that are familiar to, and representative of, the pupils themselves. This is the aim of the structures provided in the Resources Section – to teach the full range of dramatic literacy through making dramas that are inclusive of, and responsive to, the lives and maturity levels of 11–14-year-old pupils.

There is one further assumption to be made visible. I want to suggest that a drama curriculum should focus on the live experience of making and responding to theatre and that within this focus the emphasis should be on theatre as a performance art rather than on theatre as a branch of literature. In English-speaking countries, pupils will tend to encounter dramatic literature and to develop the codes of interpreting and responding to dramatic literature in English studies or language arts programmes. In many schools, knowledge and understanding of the drama of film and TV may be taught as part of English or as Media Studies. It makes sense, therefore, to concentrate on how theatre is brought to life.

At first sight this assumption – that the drama curriculum should focus on live theatre – appears to be in contradiction to my earlier warnings about the ethnocentricity and social exclusiveness of the Western theatre tradition. What I am suggesting is that the drama curriculum should start from a definition of theatre that is inclusive of a wide range of theatre/drama practices and cultural traditions: a definition that rejects the hierarchisation of these practices into ‘high/low’, superior/inferior.

I have tried to draw out, from the potential field, certain characteristics that seem to be common to all forms of live theatre and to use these characteristics to offer a definition of theatre that is inclusive but also limited, in order to make some distinction between what is theatre and what is not theatre.

The four conditions of theatre

These conditions are:

1 An elected context	Theatre is by choice. It is bracketed off from ‘daily life’. It is a mode of live experience that is special and different from our everyday experience. The ‘choice’ is often formalised by the spatial and temporal separation of theatre from life, so that performances are advertised to occur at a certain time within a designated performance space.
2 Transformation of self, time and place	Within the ‘elected context’ there is the expectation that a ‘virtual present’ or ‘imagined world’, which is representative of an ‘absent’ or ‘other’ reality, will be enacted through the symbolic transformation of presence, time and space. The performance space, the experience of time and the actors all become something...